My name is Hiroja Shibe, I would like to thank Rob Mitchell for giving me this opportunity to speak to the listeners of The Bitcoin Game and the members of the Let's Talk Bitcoin community. As you can tell from my name, I am a member of the Altcoin/Dogecoin Community and a host of my own show, Musings Of A Shibe Podcast.

Today's episode deals with the promise of Blockchain technology being used for existing legacy systems and platforms and how this could spur mass adoption of cryptocurrency by grandmothers everywhere.

This episode contains a magic word, which can be redeemed on LetsTalkBitcoin.com.

If you're a developer, you might be interested in our Coins-for-Commits program. As the platform goes open source in the coming weeks we'd like as much help as possible and you'll earn 10,000LTBc per commit that is accepted. You can find the github repository here, and the current to-do workboard here

Global tech giant and Internet pioneer Microsoft ignited a new wave of interest in both bitcoin and its brand with its surprise December announcement that it had integrated the digital currency as a payment option for digital goods.

While widely lauded by the bitcoin community as a small but forward-thinking step, optimism about the move arguably reached fever pitch when just a day later its partner BitPay suggested Microsoft was already considering ways to expand the payment option globally.

Speaking to CoinDesk, however, Microsoft offered a somewhat different take on its internal conversation regarding bitcoin. While the company did not deny that discussions about the technology were ongoing, the company sought to frame such conversation as typical for any of its products and services.

As a boy, I was fortunate to live within walking distance of my grandparents' home and can clearly remember sitting with my grandfather discussing his first computer experience. He worked for a tractor building company, Massey Ferguson, which purchased a computer for accounting. He recalled, "It took up almost an entire room and used punched paper cards to load programs."

He was recanting this story because I myself had just received my first computer, a Commodore 64, and I was only interested in playing games such as Jumpman and Golden Axe!This particular story stood out because my grandfather's other stories all involved items that were cheaper in times past. The majority his stories were very much like the Monty Python 4 Yorkshiremen Sketch:

When I was a lad a newspaper only cost a penny and a bottle of real coke was only a shilling!

The story of this huge early computer carried with it an equally huge price tag. Apparently this early computer cost more than my grandparents' first home! The Commodore 64 that my parents bought me for Christmas was expensive at the time but probably only a week of pay for my Dad.

Fast forward to present day and it feels like a generational shift in story telling is about to occur. I've already had conversations with my kids about tales of the first Bitcoin transaction where Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoins for two pizzas!

It truly feels like a shift has occurred, technology products such as computers, flat screen televisions, and the latest smart phone used to be among the few products that grew cheaper over time. But now Bitcoin has introduced deflationary pressure to the almost limitless set of items that can be purchased with bitcoin.

I've heard many people talk about how owning Bitcoin has made them more frugal and more inclined to save their cryptocurrency. Part of that might be the transacational friction of sweeping private keys from a paper wallet, or entering a twelve-word passphrase to withdraw funds, but I think deep down many of us believe that Bitcoin and many other altcoins will rise in value. We can see the true value of the technology and the social change it can bring.

In summary I'm excited to see a future where I can talk to my grand children and have the following conversations:

Me: Kids, you've got it easy! When I was a lad it cost 10,000 Bitcoin for two pizzas and a coke!Grand Kids: Grandpa, don't be silly, everyone knows you can get two pizzas and a coke for 10 Satoshis or just buy 'em using PizzaCoin!

Many thanks for reading. I would like to wish everyone out there Merry Crypto Holidays and look forward to seeing where this amazing technology takes us in 2015!

On today's show, I ask my good listeners to forgive me as I replay a previous episode.

With the holidays upon us and traveling out of town to visit family and friends, it was impossible for me to schedule an new interview and do all the associated editing and compiling necessary for a new show. The good news is that the interview I had with Andreas Antonopoulos a few weeks back has been reproduced in all its audio glory for those of you who have heard it and for those of you who may have missed it--and of course for my new listeners who are listening in for the very first time.

Thanks for listening everyone, and I hope you enjoy the show!

Show Notes

Today, I feel so very fortunate to have my good friend Mr. Andreas Antonopoulos on the show. Mr. Antonopoulos is a passionate teacher who shares some updates about the University of Nicosia in Cypress and the exciting news that they have launched the very first Master of Science degree in Digital Currency. This degree is also now offered to students worldwide through an online format. Listeners, don't bother pinching yourselves--you're not asleep and you're not dreaming. It IS true; you can now earn a Masters Degree in Digital Currency. Mr. Antonopoulos knows a great deal about this degree as one of the teachers teaching the course, and we're thrilled to have him on the show.

The popular file sharing site, launched in 2003, was recently taken offline following a raid by Swedish police. It’s a sad event for a site that is supposed to be all about unassailable file sharing. Though resurrected versions of The Pirate Bay may already be back up online, the latest interruption to its service raises a host a questions.

What does this raid mean for decentralised P2P filesharing? Can the same technologies that underpin cryptocurrencies help sustain or even enhance decentralised P2P filesharing networks like The Pirate Bay?

If you're a developer, you might be interested in our Coins-for-Commits program. As the platform goes open source in the coming weeks we'd like as much help as possible and you'll earn 10,000LTBc per commit that is accepted. You can find the github repository here, and the current to-do workboard here

Even though 2015 is right around the corner, some might say that bitcoin was still in its 'Wild West' days throughout the course of this year.

While it's easy to appreciate all of bitcoin's best qualities – it's cheap, fast and reliable, to name a few – it's harder to ignore that bitcoin has also been associated with less desirable parts of life – like crime and scandal.

At Bitcoin2014, Gavin Andresen proclaimed 2014 to be the year of multisig. Putting debate over whether this prediction came to fruition aside, continue reading to learn more about multisig technology.

What are multisignature addresses?

Multisignature addresses (or multisigs) are addresses that allow more than one signature to spend the funds. Oftentimes multiple signatures are required in conjunction. The acceptable signatures and number required is determined upon creation of the address. The most common case accepts three signatures and requires two of the three to initiate a transaction.

More technically, multisigs are one special use case of Pay To Script Hash (P2SH) transactions. P2SH was introduced to allow for scripts to regulate the redemption conditions of funds. Regulating how outgoing funds can be redeemed -- instead of regulating incoming funds sent to an address -- makes it easier to introduce these addresses. Sending funds to a multisig address works exactly the same as any other address.

From the outside, multisigs are only different from regular addresses in that they start with a 3. Multisig addresses are not fully contained in a wallet.dat file. They are created using several regular addresses whose private keys never have to exist in the same place. Therefore, multisigs normally occur in the blockchain, but not inside a single wallet instance. They are managed using the regular addresses used to create them and a redemption script. You need to have backups of the creation address private keys, but not of the multisig. In fact there is no private key.

P2SH (and hence multisigs) was introduced to Bitcoin in 2012. Other cryptocurrencies based on the core Bitcoin code, like Darkcoin, also have multisig capabilities, which work in the same way.

Reasons to use multisigs

The main reason to use multisigs is security. An attacker would need to gain control over more than one signature to steal funds, making theft more difficult. Some people use multisigs to require their signature from two different devices they control, eliminating the risk of their funds being stolen if only one device is compromised.

Another very important use case is for funds that belong to organizations or groups of individuals. If the multisig requires more than one signature and the allowed signatures are distributed between different people, no single person can misuse or lose access to funds. This is something we've seen many times in crypto, so a wider adoption of multisigs would help strengthen the ecosystem. Multisigs should be standard in any organization that holds funds on behalf of other people. They are easier to work with than commonly assumed, so there is really no excuse. For the recently launched Darkcoin Foundation (disclaimer: I€™m in the board of directors), we receive funds to a multisig address that everyone can check. Members love it because they know that we take their funds seriously.

Tools

The number of wallets and services that offer multisigs has increased over the last few months. However, they are not used as much as they could be. One reason could be that many times multisigs are mixed with cold storage or other features like timelocks, making them more complex and scaring people off.

I'm not a huge supporter of online wallets, but some offer nice multisig features. However, the reason to go multisig is more security, which I don't believe can be fully obtained if you have to trust or rely on third parties. Even if third parties don't store your private keys on their servers (usually they store them in a browser extension), I would rather manage my funds using a local wallet. I prefer not to depend on third parties whose services may become unavailable in future. Call me old fashioned!

Anyway, if you want to explore the third-party route, there are a few promising services. I've heard great reviews of Coinb.in, onchain.io, copay.io, and greenaddress.it, and there are probably more worth considering. For some use cases, these services may be perfectly fine, so don't discard them just because I prefer other options.

As for local wallets, the only one that really excels in multisigs is Armory. It manages multisigs from the GUI (in the expert user setup) and also offers cold storage for offline computers. It is an amazing product, but it is huge (30 GB of hard disk space, additional to the 29 GB for the Bitcoin blockchain) and most people won't need so many features.

If you don't want to use Armory, the other option is to use the command line/console in other wallets. Both Electrum and Bitcoin Core are capable enough. This option seems more complex, but once you get used, it is not that bad.

Clearly, there is yet a lot of work to be done in this space. However, that shouldn't be an excuse to not use multisigs. With some work, you don't need special wallets or services. As I mentioned before, at the Darkcoin Foundation we use multisigs, and we manage them with Darkcoin Core and Bitcoin Core without any problems.

An example for Darkcoin Core and Bitcoin Core wallets

Setting up a multisig address is super easy with Qt wallets. Receiving funds works exactly as it does when receiving them in a regular address. Spending is a bit trickier, but it can be easily mastered. It will take 30 minutes the first time and 5 once you are used to it.

This is probably not the place for a super detailed step-by-step guide, so I'll just give the basic instructions and hints. I'll add some screenshots and links from an example address and transactions done with Darkcoin Core. Darkcoin is the coin I use most, but Bitcoin multisigs work exactly the same in Bitcoin Core. If you want the super detailed step by step process, you can check the one I wrote in Darkcoin's wiki with this same example address.

Creation

You need the addresses that you are going to use to sign in the multisig. For a simple 2 of 3 multisig, you need the three addresses' public keys.

To get the public key you can use the command validateaddress. It is also a good idea to get the private key and keep it somewhere safe.

With the three public keys and the command createmultisig, you create the multisig address and get the redemption script. Anyone can do this, the result will be the same if the order of the public keys is the same.

Funding

As I said, sending to a multisig address is exactly the same as with regular addresses and transactions look the same. The only difference is that multisigs start with a 3. There are still some services out there that don't recognize multisig addresses as valid, but they are few. If you encounter any problem sending, you'll have to move the funds somewhere else and send from there. You should also report the problem to the developers of that service/wallet. If they don't adapt, you should really consider switching!

Spending

Spending is the reason d'etre for multisigs. You'll need as many signatures as defined when creating the address with the createmultisig command in step 1.

The particularity is that you need to create the transaction manually. Besides the address to pay and the amount, you'll need to tell the wallet what inputs to use, what miners fee to pay (very important to avoid having the transaction stuck or paying a huge fee) and where to send the change (usually, back to the multisig). After that, the transaction needs to be signed and sent to the network.

This is done in several steps:

Create the transaction with the createrawtransaction command

Sign the transaction with the signrawtransaction command

Send the data to the next signatory

Next signatory/ies signs the transaction

Last signatory broadcasts the transaction to the network with the sendrawtransaction command

To do all this, you will need some information on the outputs received by the multisig. You can get all of it with the listunspent (or a blockchain explorer) and getrawtransacion commands. To sign the transaction each signatory will use the private key of the address used to create the multisig. Never, never, never share your private keys. The private keys in the screenshot below are shown to illustrate the example, and I will never use that address again.

As I said, it may not be straightforward, but it is not extremely difficult. With some work and a text editor (you'll be using long text strings, so it is better to work in a text editor and paste the commands in the console/command line) anybody can master this method. If you are proficient enough you could also write some scripts to automate most of the steps. In fact, there are several scripts already available, but I recommend to only do what you can understand.

If you combine the power of multisigs with timelocks the possibilities are even bigger, but I'll leave that for another article.

Thursday, 25 December 2014

We intend to cover topics involving blockchain-based approaches to fixing some of the problems related to the current Internet infratructure. This includes core services like the Domain Name System (DNS), messaging sysytems like email and chat services, cloud storage systems, distributed applications and more.

Episode 1 - Show Notes

Mike and Dante discuss recent events:

bitcoin.com.au seized and auctioned off by registrar due to invalid WHOIS info

And we have an exclusive interview with Oleg Khovayko from Emercoin Project discussing what makes this system different from others in the space. Emercoin implements blockchain-based DNS, acts as a name-value store, finds clever uses for storing credentials on a blockchain and more.

We discuss design considerations for Emercoin like the sliding domain name registration costs, minimum transaction fees, their modified Peercoin hybrid PoW/PoS, the rationale for using STUN protocol, storing SSH credentials on-chain, folding at home project, minecraft in-game currency, and other uses for Emercoin's 20k storage in Name-Value pairs. We also ask Oleg what the future plans are for Emercoin.

Apologies in advance for the poor audio quality, we'll certainly work to improve this in future episodes. Also the length of this pilot episiode is long, so be prepared to dive in deep.

Links

We use many sources to prepare for discussions of these topics, but here are the most accessible and thoughtful links we found on the topics covered in this podcast.

On today's show, I'm very happy to be speaking with Matthew Bivins of Chicago, Illinois. Matthew is a web developer, an actor, and a former member of the totally crypto band Jump, Little Children. Matthew and I talk about everything under the sun including traffic in Chicago, helping kids learn how to read better, tipping content creators using Bitcoin, and his career as a rock 'n' roll star who was right there when the music industry started falling apart.

The band: Jump, Little Children (http://jumphq.com) The website is 10 years old so there are no new updates, but there is plenty about the group on the Internet. Their music can also be found on Spotify and iTunes.

Washington Post columnist Henry Farrell has just added himself to the Nakamoto Institute’s running list of skeptics making bold assertions about the certain demise of Bitcoin. In a post entitled “Bitcoin’s financial network is doomed,” Mr. Farrell demonstrates his short-sightedness in the face of Bitcoin’s subtlety and allure, perhaps as a cunning-though-not-so-original means of acquiring cheap coins for himself. Regardless of his motivations, I couldn’t resist a full rebuttal, if only to reassure the weak hands among us that no, Bitcoin is still not doomed, and yes, Mr. Farrell is in for a rude awakening if he really believes the poor arguments he makes in his Post article. Without further adieu, a rebuttal to Mr. Henry Farrell, Bitcoin Skeptic:

“There is a reason why you have to “comply with hundreds of pages of regulations” to use the Visa network that goes beyond Visa’s selfish corporate interests. That reason is government.”

No, the reason you have to comply with hundreds of pages of regulations is that those networks are run by centralized entities that reside in a particular legal jurisdiction and are therefore vulnerable to attacks by the government and other powerful adversaries. The centralization of the networks precedes their vulnerability. Without this vulnerability, government regulation is as effective and enforceable as a law against breathing. See: Bitcoin.

“Governments regulate payment networks very heavily, for a wide variety of reasons, which include making sure that people don’t use these networks to support activities that governments don’t like. They use financial intermediaries as ‘points of control’ that allow them to control who does business with whom.”

Yes, and politically marginalized journalists and businesses are great examples of how this power is abused. And Bitcoin is a great example of how this power becomes irrelevant.

Quoting Obama administration official David Cohen, “Carefully designed and customized to maximize pressure, [economic sanctions] have impeded Iran’s ability to acquire material for its nuclear program, isolated it from the international financial system, drastically slashed its oil exports, and deprived it of access to a sizeable portion of its oil revenues and foreign reserves.”

This sounds like a great argument for Iranians to convert their oil into electricity to mine bitcoins, which can then be sold locally, exported to be sold abroad, or sent anywhere in the world to buy whatever they need directly for bitcoin.

Continuing the quote from David Cohen, “Not surprisingly, the impact on Iran’s economy has been dramatic: its budget deficit and inflation have spiked, the value of its currency has sharply declined, foreign investment has all but dried up, and overall economic activity has stagnated.”

Collectively punishing an entire population of millions of innocent, peaceful people for the actions of political leaders that are forced on them doesn’t sound like something to brag about. But like Madeline Albricht before him, I’m sure Mr. Cohen would say that the Iranian people’s suffering is “worth it.”

Continuing the quote, “Put simply, financial institutions everywhere need dollars to serve their customers, and thus require access to U.S. banks through correspondent accounts to settle their customers’ transactions.”

They need dollars, until theydon’t. And with many fiat currencies growing weaker by the day, people may elect to do an end-run around their rulers and choose a politically-neutral option like bitcoin instead of trusting their government not to mess up the next attempt at fiat currency.

“Now, imagine the likely response of the U.S. (and the E.U., and, for that matter, China) to a payment network which is designed from the ground up to be decentralized, so that it is impossible for any specific intermediaries to really control payment flows from one actor to another.”

“While Bitcoin allows consumers to buy illegal drugs on Tor Hidden Services sites like Agora and Evolution, they don’t do so on a sufficiently large scale to really cause enormous alarm.”

‘They’re just subverting a decades-old policy of prohibition out in the open, no big deal.’ Keep downplaying bitcoin’s revolutionary effects, it just makes the rest of the arguments look even more absurd. In reality, politicians probably learned after the first “enormous alarm” that they raised about this capability that they should just shut up and let law enforcement do their job rather than draw too much attention to the fact that people can easily go online and buy “any drug imaginable” using bitcoin.

“But if Bitcoin were ever to threaten to become a truly decentralized payments network, owned by no one, and with no one e.g. capable of implementing Know Your Customer rules…”

In case you didn’t notice, Bitcoin already is a “truly decentralized payments network, owned by no one…”

“If Tim Lee and other Bitcoin fans want to make the case that Bitcoin can become a major payment network, they need to do one of two things.”

“First, they could show that the U.S. and other major states would not feel threatened by a well-established payment system that they couldn’t control.”

Telling such a story would be lying. The good news: the sooner they assimilate, the less painful it will be.

“Second, they could show that a Bitcoin financial network would survive the opposition of hostile states that have enormous control over the actually-existing financial systems that Bitcoin needs to connect to, as well as regulators, police, etc.”

As former Executive Director of the Bitcoin Foundation Jon Matonis pointed out in Forbes almost two years ago, a ban on bitcoin would “fail miserably.” The only remaining option to curb adoption would be to attack the network itself (as opposed to the endpoints that a ban would target). Given the time and resources required for such an attack, bitcoin adoption could spread to the point that a concerted attack on the network would be too expensive before such an attack would even be feasible. As suggested earlier in this post, it’s not unimaginable that marginalized States (like Iran) would contribute resources to secure and utilize the Bitcoin network. I have already heard rumors that a government in China is converting locally produced coal into electricity to mine bitcoins because it’s not worth exporting the coal itself. Assimilation may be occurring sooner than expected.

Even if a State were to marshal the resources necessary to launch a credible attack against the Bitcoin network, developers could change the code within hours to render an attack impotent, and a game of whack-a-mole would ensue which would likely be a) politically unpopular since, presumably, a lot of people actually want to use bitcoin b) financially draining, since new specialized computers would need to be manufactured for each attack, consuming huge amounts of electricity in the process and c) pointless in the long run, since there are hundreds of alternative cryptocurrencies people could choose to use instead of bitcoin if things got really ugly – good luck trying to attack them all!

“Bitcoin is doomed as a payments network — the very point at which it looks as though it is likely to be widely deployed is the point at which governments, like that of the United States, will crack down on it.”

Even if this were true, it would not render false any of the above arguments in favor of Bitcoin’s survival. Bitcoin can – and would – survive a direct attack.

“US understands the value of its influence over the global financial system, and is demonstrably willing to upset business in order to pursue its strategic aims.”

Yes, and like a bull in a china shop, destroying all that is good in the process – except Bitcoin.

“Moreover, much of this power comes from the fact that any individual payment system, if it is to be effective, needs to be interoperable with other payment systems which, by and large, rest on transactions in US dollars.”

Bitcoin already coexists with fiat payment networks via payment processors such as BitPay, but if hyperbitcoinization were to occur, that wouldn’t even be necessary anymore. Bitcoin would not need to interoperate with other payment systems because it would be THE payment system. And it would not “rest on transactions in US dollars” any more than the auto industry rests on the supply of horse feed. Given sufficient liquidity post-hyperbitcoinization, a bitcoin wallet and an Internet connection is about all that will be needed to conduct commerce of any magnitude with anyone in the world.

“The sorry recent history of financial flows to and from another stateless financial system, Somalia, provide some evidence of how difficult life can get for financial networks that have been targeted by the US state.”

The history provides evidence of how difficult life can get for centralized financial networks! As pointed out at the very beginning of this piece, this is a vulnerability that Bitcoin explicitly by design does not share. For this reason, Bitcoin will survive where others have failed. With this in mind, cue the dramatic music and bring on the doom!

If you or anyone you know would like to learn how to use bitcoin to gain some monetary freedom for yourself, I am running a crowdfunding campaign through New Year’s Day 2015 for an online course and companion e-book entitled “BYOB: Using Bitcoin to Be Your Own Bank.” This course and book would make a great gift for the bit-curious who haven’t yet found the time or place to learn about bitcoin in an easily accessible format. Even if you can’t contribute, please share the campaign on social media – you might be surprised at who gets turned on to bitcoin when presented with an opportunity to learn!

One of the big questions about digital currency is whether or not the technology will be utilized on a broader scale by the spending public. Those who foresee a rise in use by consumers argue that it’s only a matter of time before existing payment mechanisms are supplanted by bitcoin or another coin, while those more critical of this area of adoption counter that many spenders will be loath to give up their cash and credit cards in favor of digital currencies.

The nature of this debate hasn’t stopped some from betting on the embrace of digital currency by consumers. Over the past two weeks, Ziftr, a New Hampshire-based e-commerce solutions provider, has raised more than $600,000 during a crowdsale of its own altcoin, ziftrcoin, which the company is pitching as a user-friendly alternative to bitcoin.

How would you like to get paid for publishing a feature on Let's Talk Bitcoin?

We've made some changes to the way submissions work on the site and have seriously streamlined the process for those interested in submitting posts for the website.

You may have noticed that we've added a small fee to purchase "publishing tokens" on the site. These tokens are designed to help fight spam submissions and make the editing process a bit easier on our editors.

While you have a slight up-front cost now for publishing items on Let's Talk Bitcoin, you'll still be earning LTBcoin if your submission is published. Consider the small up-front cost an investment in your feature. If we decide to publish it, you'll get more than the cost of the coins back in the form of a payment.

This is truly a win-win situation for everyone involved.

As we grow and expand the Let's Talk Bitcoin network, we continue to learn from our users, contributors, and members. We've already taken these learning experiences and started putting them to work. We understand the editorial process needs some love, and we are hard at work revamping how this is handled.

We wanted to take a few minutes to talk about some of commitments our team is making that will help grow things out.

Submissions will now be reviewed in a more timely manner. With the old system, we received a lot of spam submissions that made it difficult to keep up with the more legitimate materials being submitted to the site. With the new system, we have a chance to decrease the level of content that isn't legitimate and takes away from our editorial review team's time.

In-depth editorial commentary. Our new system allows the editors assigned to your piece at Let's Talk Bitcoin the ability to privately converse with you. If we need clarity or changes on something you submit, we can now communicate directly with you instead of sending you a private message.

Additional editors. We are bringing in some additional editorial review members to help get submissions reviewed faster.

We invite you to submit a story you'd like to see on the homepage of Let's Talk Bitcoin today. We are working hard to bring content to our readers in a timely manner and bring even more opportunities to our community members to earn LTBcoin.

Thanks to our developers for the hard work they are putting in to Let's Talk Bitcoin, our editorial team, our fearless leader @adam, and you for being a member.

We look forward to reading your submissions and seeing them on the site!

If you're a developer, you might be interested in our Coins-for-Commits program. As the platform goes open source in the coming weeks we'd like as much help as possible and you'll earn 10,000LTBc per commit that is accepted. You can find the github repository here, and the current to-do workboard here

Monday, 22 December 2014

In this SovereignBTC Podcast, one of the last in the Uncoinventional Living West Series, John Bush interviews Robert Podolsky, physicist and author, about forming small hierarchical mutual aid groups called octologues, for the purpose of building an ethical society. We discuss why groups numbering 8 maximize creativity, we explore Podolsky's understanding of ethics, and we chat about how Bitcoin technology could benefit it all.

Don't miss this radical exploration of a different way to organize society based not on coercive monopolistic hierarchies, but on decentralized and voluntarily organized communities.

Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. - Roberts and Roberts Brokerage Inc. specializes in precious metals sales and just launched a brand new online store. Pay with bitcon and use coupon code BITCOIN to get free shipping with your next purcahse.

While the altcoin markets may still be suffering from the volume doldrums of the summer and fall, that doesn’t mean that work hasn’t continued in the meantime – far from it, according to recent developments.

Though the news isn’t 100% positive on the alt front, the space continues to push ahead as it always has, for better or for worse. Read on for some of the recent happenings that have come across the All Things Alt desk.

Facebook represents the ultimate success that can be achieved by a technology company in the current paradigm; publicly traded with a valuation in the billions and broad global use of the service. That matters because a social network is just like any network, it becomes exponentially more valuable the more active users it has, so as the defacto solution for the interested market, theyre pretty happy.

But theres a problem with Facebook, and its not the lack of monetization options they have to go from dot-com to a sustainable, profitable business model. The problem is if you want to use social networks for anything beyond sharing recipes, being fed content from your favorite blogs you dont want to bother to visit, or catching up with college friends, youll see the weakness.

Remember Napster? They were the folks who introduced peer to peer sharing of music and who were crushed because the service they offered (peer to peer duplicative sharing of music at basically no cost to either party coordinated by a central server) was dangerous to the status quo (of music publishing).

The services provided by a social network are multi-faceted. On the one hand youve got cat and baby pictures, but on some special days youve got the Arab Spring or the Occupy movement. Back in those early days of social networks being used to communicate between mass groups of people who didnt know each other, these efforts were heralded by the American media as proof of the platforms utility in breaking down the walls put up by repressive governments to control the ability to organize.

Moscow (AFP) - Russian authorities convinced Facebook to shut off a page inviting people to attend a rally in support of an opposition politician, drawing ire from Internet users Sunday.Supporters on Friday created an event page for January 15, the day President Vladimir Putin's biggest critic Alexei Navalny will hear his verdict in a controversial embezzlement case which could see him sent him to prison for up to 10 years.Russia's Internet watchdog Roskomnadzor said Sunday that the page has been blocked on orders of the general prosecutor.The prosecutor "demanded to limit access to a number of resources calling for an unsanctioned mass event, including social networking groups. The demand has been fulfilled," RIA-Novosti news agency quoted spokesman Vadim Ampelonsky as saying.The Facebook event, called "Public gathering to discuss the verdict", had over 12,000 people signed up at the time it was blocked, and now opens only through a non-Russian IP and only for non-Russian users.Navalny, whose leadership role in the opposition was built up over the years via his popular anti-corruption blog and carefully-managed Internet campaigns, criticised the social networking giant for quickly bending under Kremlin's pressure."It's a rather unpleasant and surprising behaviour by Russian Facebook. I thought they would at least demand a court order rather than rush to block pages as soon as crooks from the Roskomnadzor (the Internet watchdog) ask," he wrote on his personal page.Former US ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul wrote on his Twitter blog that the block set a "horrible precedent" and that Facebook should correct their "mistake" as soon as possible.

Supporters quickly signed up onto newly-created event pages and made new ones blasting Facebook's "censorship".

Navalny, a 38-year-old lawyer, is accused together with his brother Oleg of embezzling nearly 27 million rubles (more than half a million dollars at the exchange rate at the time) when Yves Rocher Vostok, the company's Russian wing, used their delivery firm.The case is only one of many against him. A previous probe into embezzlement of a state timber company saw him sentenced to five years though the sentence was suspended later.

At their core, social networks are about connecting and enabling communication between people who might know each other or might not know each other, on a common topic of interest or through connections in the social web.

The beautiful thing about a pervasive service that everybody uses, is anybody can be reached by anybody else without doing anything complicated like being part of multiple networks.

The problem with a pervasive service is that if the company that plays caretaker to that service is weak, then you've got one of the best tools ever invented for not only putting the kibosh on protests, but a time-stamped record and investigative tool to look back and prove just how crazy that guy really is.

The problem is not social networks, its the caretaker company more concerned with its own survival and profit than the utility and neutrality of the network. There is no way around this issue. The bigger the company, the easier it is to pressure them if you're important, as we see with the Russian situation above.

The problem is Centralization. The fact is, a single company pressured in this way will always give in if they perceive the potential damage from declining the choice to be worse than the push-back theyll get from their users for giving them up.

Decentralized social networks are not a panacea, but in this particular circumstance they just dont have the vulnerability. Russia or any other country for that matter can achieve censorship simply by looking at Facebook like a big fat sheep and baring its teeth menacingly. Facebook might be able to hold out for a while, demand a court order before complying as part of its policies and procedures, but when the ability to do business in the country relies on the continued good will of that countrys leadership, you'll find its an easy choice for them to make, future public handwringing not withstanding.

On the other hand a decentralized social network has no company with servers behind it storing user updates. One or many companies only make and improve the open source software utilized by users and organizations to collaboratively create the network through the process of using it. Sure, Russia could threaten the creators of the software, but as they have literally no control over what it is being used for and by whom, the threat is for public eyes only.

Think about social networks as seacraft. A decentralized model is like a million rafts loosely lashed together, one for each user. It can grow as large as is necessary in any direction. If necessary it can be separated into chunks that will still each operate as a raft made of rafts. The Facebook model looks a bit more like the titanic, as the number of users grow the ship must get bigger. Its not only more troublesome to scale, but presents a huge target to anyone looking to mess with a lot of people.

These things dont exist yet; technologies like STORJ and MAIDSAFE represent the fascinating development of decentralized, peer to peer storage and computing networks that could power such a thing. But the first shot has been fired in the battle over the purpose of social networking. If all you wanted was dogs wearing hats, nothing has changed for you. If you think social networks can do social good that won't necessarily be approved by the status quo, you should start thinking about decentralized social networks.

Sunday, 21 December 2014

On today's show, I'm very happy to be speaking with Matthew Bivins of Chicago, Illinois. Matthew is a web developer, an actor, and a former member of the totally crypto band Jump, Little Children. Matthew and I talk about everything under the sun including traffic in Chicago, helping kids learn how to read better, tipping content creators using Bitcoin, and his career as a rock 'n' roll star who was right there when the music industry started falling apart.

The band: Jump, Little Children (http://jumphq.com) The website is 10 years old so there are no new updates, but there is plenty about the group on the Internet. Their music can also be found on Spotify and iTunes.

Tatiana sat down with Martin Davidson of Coin Station at the grand opening of the Melbourne Australia Bitcoin Technology Center, MBTC for short! Martin fills us in on his path into Bitcoin and how a Coin Station Vending Machine will help individuals use Bitcoin easily! He has such great enthusiasm, though that doesn’t surprise me! Australia is a hot bed of crypto activity!

Saturday, 20 December 2014

The white hat hacker known as Johoe ("Yo-ho") rescued over 870 Bitcoins recently from addresses compromised by a temporary bug in Blockchain.info's web wallet. Today I'm honored to introduce Jochen ("Yo-hen"), who works as a computer science researcher at a university in Germany, and is known on BitcoinTalk.org as Johoe. Bitcoin is a hobby Jochen took up in early 2013, as he first discovered the repeated R value issue, due to a 2013 bug in Android's random number generator that affected the security of some Bitcoin wallet apps.

Jochen has literally raced against other hackers to grab Bitcoin in compromised addresses, knowing his opponents have no intention of returning any Bitcoin they grab first.

Aside from this being the first audio interview of Jochen aka Johoe, this is also the first time he tells the Bitcoin world that that it was he who returned 17 Bitcoins to Counterparty, after their Counterwallet had a temporary bug earlier this year that also produced repeating R values.

Listen for the magic word, and submit it to your LetsTalkBitcoin.com account to claim a share of this week's distribution of LTBcoin. If you haven't set up an account yet, what are you waiting for? The magic word must be submitted by 11:40pm (Pacific Time / GMT-8:00) on December 24th.

Music in this episode was created by me, or with friends and family. Ganesh Painting Company is the name of one of the jam bands I feature live recordings of regularly. Some of the musicians you're hearing in the band are Mike Coleman, Rick Marshal, and Michael Goldstein. Feel free to contact me if you want more info about any music you hear on the podcast.